


a country far away as health

by LoosePilgrim



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Violence, Vomiting, and overuse of the definite article, this is just all angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 12:39:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15001064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoosePilgrim/pseuds/LoosePilgrim
Summary: In the fall of a certain year, in the north of a certain kingdom, a man took a body to a box and laid the body inside. He walked away from the body, and the body stayed there for many years.When the body had been a boy (a man; a boy) it had had a good memory.The body in the box had a good memory too. Here is what the body remembers:---A story about the years Caleb spent in the asylum.





	a country far away as health

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The title comes from "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath.  
> 2\. Thanks to [fasach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fasach/pseuds/fasach) for being a great beta.  
> 3\. The treatments administered in this story all have their basis in treatments that were actually used on mentally ill people in the past.  
> 4\. I don't think the tags give a full picture of possibly-triggering content, so please see the end notes for a more complete content warning list.  
> 5\. There will be a sequel.

 

 

 

**a country far away as health**

  
  


In the fall of a certain year, in the north of a certain kingdom, a man took a body to a box and laid the body inside. He walked away from the body, and the body stayed there for many years.   
  
When the body had been a boy (a man; a boy) he had had a good memory. Remembered every pattern on the leaves of every tree in his village, and the names of the trees too. The precise pages on which to find just the words he wanted. Remembered the exact time of day (half past seven in the evening, in the summer, when the sun was only just setting) when the man (the boy) realized he was in love. Remembered the rough wood of a horse cart under steady hands, and what the exact moment of heartbreak tastes like.   
  
The body in the box had a good memory too. Here is what the body remembers:   
  
  
***   
  
  
There were potions, always, so many. Potions to make the mouth move in shapes that looked like  _ sorry _ or  _ mother _ ,  _ stop _ or  _ please _ . The body knew they only looked like those words, the body knew they were really rats, or insects with too many legs, come dripping from the swamp in the body’s fetid belly and out the mouth.   
  
The body would tell them occasionally:  _ There are people sunk inside this body. Dead people. _ __  
__  
There were potions to make the body sweat out its poisons, to make the body shiver with phantom cold. Sometimes the body opened easy to the potions, and sometimes there was no easy and instead a rod to soft flesh, or a fist in the hair and a hand on the jaw. Potions to make the body vomit, and vomit again (again, again) until the limbs were thin and shaking like paper lanterns in the wind. Still the swamp in the belly remained wet and full of its creatures, its corpses.   
  
The body would plead— _ please help me get them out _ —and there were potions to snuff out the voice like a candle. The mouth could open and the tongue could wag but no sounds that would have been screaming or crying or begging crawled out, only the many-legged and dripping, smelling things. Sometimes the body would try to say thank you, because the body did not always want to hear itself.   
  
There were potions to make the body limp and pliable as dough; these the body did not want. There were potions to make the body sleep, and these the body wanted.   
  
  
***   
  
  
In the box there were people. They had faces sometimes, in the days or years when the fog rising out of the belly was thinner and the body could see better. Mostly they had no faces.   
  
What they had were: voices (flat and cold like a slap; or regular and tolling as bells; or dry-grass-rasping) and hands (that pulled, that pushed, that caressed, that struck, cut, prodded, measured, wrenched, dug in, stroked, spread, gripped hard and harder, that sunk in like dye and would not leave even when they left the body).   
  
Many voices, many hands.   
  
  
***   
  
  
There were different kinds of people in the box.   
  
The first kind liked to ask the body questions it did not understand; their voices said they were trying to help the body get better. A face the body remembers asked about the swamp in the belly. Asked who put the dead people there.   
  
_ This one did. _ __  
__  
_ And who are they _ ?    
  
_ People this body killed. A man who betrayed. A woman who deserted. Thieves. Assassins.  _ The body hesitated, but truth was impossible to avoid, like the faint scent of blood and urine shining everywhere in the box. _ Mother and Father. _ __  
__  
Those voices would tell the body it was wrong.  _ It’s all in your head _ , they would say.  _ These horrible things you think you did, you’ve imagined them. It’s all in your head. _ __  
__  
_ It is all in my head _ , the body would agree.  _ This body has a magpie living in its skull. It collects everything. It showed me where the dead people are. _ __  
__  
They wanted the body to make the shape of a lie with its mouth and tell them it was a person, a person who had fashioned a story out of colored glass, a person who had a family looking for him on the horizon. The body could not tell them what they wanted to hear. (When the body had been a son:  _ You should never lie, Caleb, it’s very bad to lie _ .)   
  
_ Mother,  _ the body would remind the voices.  _ Father _ .   
  
When this kind of person hurt the body, they told the body it was to help it get better, get clean. The body believed they believed that.   
  
  
***   
  
  
If the body could be very still, they would sometimes place it next to a window and the body could watch the aperture of the sun gape and taper over the world beyond the box. When the sky opened up and heaved rain at the world, the body would press the face to glass and feel the tiny finger-tapping against its cheek. It knew it should not let itself do this, the body knew it did not deserve it. But the body could be so weak, sometimes.   
  
When the voices called it by a dead man’s name, the body would get agitated, as if the bones wanted to rattle the dead flesh apart.  _ You’re not a murderer, Caleb _ , the voices would tell the body.  _ Caleb, it’s time to eat. How are you feeling today, Caleb? _ __  
__  
If the body got too excited they would give it a potion and make it go limp and gray, and they would tie the body to a bed with no windows nearby.   
  
  
***   
  
  
The second kind of person the body liked less, but it understood them better. They did not want to get the body clean. This second kind was there to remind the body why it had been laid in the box, why it deserved to hurt.   
  
If they asked the body questions— _ What are you staring at? Are you gonna be a good boy for me? Are you trying to piss me off? You like that, don’t you? _ —they were not the kind that wanted answers.     
  
Sometimes this second kind of person pretended to be the first. They would say all the things the first kind said, but when they slid the knives across the arms or pulled down the potions to make the body quake, their expressions glittered like flies.   
  
  
***   
  
  
The body stayed in the box for many years. People of all kinds would come and go. For a while there was a person in the box who would speak to the body with a voice like strong, warm tea.   
  
_ I thought maybe you’d like to have a look at this. _ Hands took the body’s hands—gently, gently—and placed an object there. Something bound in chestnut-colored leather, something that made a rabbit start kicking in the body’s chest.  _ They’re just children’s stories, but I figured everyone likes fairy tales. _ __  
__  
The body did not open the book for a week. It ran the fingers over and over and over the leaves and whorls stamped into the leather. The body gave these things to the magpie, so that it could carve out each marking to itself again and again, on those long nights when the body was made to lay down in the dark and pretend to sleep.   
  
_ Are you ever going to actually read it? _ __  
__  
_ This one wants to remember everything.  _ The book made the clouds thinner, thin enough for the body to make words that were not just shapes. _ It knows their hands will take it away, and when it does _ …the body tapped the head, and the mouth made a smile. The person smiled back, and watched the body open the book to the first page.   
  
  
***   
  
  
There was pain, always, and this the body did not want. But the body knew it deserved it and so the body tried not to resist when the hands came down hard, or cut the body with sharp silver, or opened the body up in a dark room, or pushed needles into the arms. But the body could not always help when its limbs made the movements of pushing or kicking. And the body was sorry it could not be good.   
  
_ But _ , the body reasoned to itself,  _ if the body was good the body would not be here _ .   
  
  
***   
  
  
Eventually, other voices began to chime and tick over the book.  __ These stories will excite him too much. Their words got bigger and bigger. Finally hands came to pry it from the body.   
  
The body could not help itself. It screamed. It ran. It managed to tear out a handful of pages and stuff them into its mouth before the book was seized.   
  
Ink on the tongue was bitter and whole, paper fibrous and clean under teeth. The magpie had collected everything but still the body wanted, still was terrified of its own animal emptiness, its wet, wet hunger. The body could not help itself.   
  
The body could be so weak.   
  
When hands eventually untied the body from the bed, the legs were brittle as kindling. The person with the book went out into the world beyond the box, forever.   
  
  
***   
  
  
Occasionally the body was very bad. It would hope it was done being and would try to stop itself. It did this with a rope, a knife, a vial of something oily and smoke-colored. Quick or slow, the hands found the body with its knotted rope or dripping knife and stopped the trying.   
  
When this happened, the body was put into a soft room for days, swaddled and bound up in cloth. The arms would be roped tight around the chest, and the body loathed the forced embrace of itself.   
  
  


***   
  
  
There was water, always, so much. The body wrapped tightly in sheets soaked in freezing water, so that the arms and the legs could not move except to tremble like snared birds.    
  
The body shackled into a tub, with a belt to keep the head from slipping under. Sometimes the water would be scalding, but more often it was frigid, a polar sea captured in porcelain. Overnight, for hours, for days—the ears would listen to the mouth grind its groans against the rippling water.    
  
Other times: a bucket of suds dumped over the head, and another, and another, too fast for the body to suck in air between torrents (another, another).   
  
_ Nice and clean _ , a voice might say.  _ Doesn’t that feel good? _ __  
__  
Even when the eyes could look down at the body and see it scoured loose of grime and filth, even when the hands had scraped away all the hair on the head and the face ( _ riddled with lice, he is; disgusting _ ) the body knew it was not clean, not really.    
  
And for the body to let the body lie like that ( _ You should never lie, Caleb, it’s very bad to lie _ ) made it wrench the nails into the legs, the arms, all the flesh the hands could reach, dig up the swamp the body knew was waiting just under the surface, print it on the skin as a book the hands couldn’t take.    
  
  
***   
  
  
Once the body found a dropped ring and tried to stop itself with fire. The body remembers this went very badly. There was now a new person sunk in its belly, no matter how many sorrys the mouth shaped.   
  
After that, the body was put into the soft room and there it stayed for a long time. The door opened for bowls and buckets, and occasionally quick hands moved the body out of its swaddles and replaced them. But any hand-on-back, or hand-on-mouth, or hand-on-wrist was gone in a breath. There were no voices.   
  
The door opened. The door closed. Sometimes the body fed itself. Sometimes it did not, and the hands would appear and make the mouth open and chew and swallow. Sometimes the body would not eat just to make this happen, and when it did the body’s skin threatened to dissolve under the hands. The door opened. The door closed.   
  
There were no voices. For a long time, the body did not speak. It shut its eyes and concentrated on stopping the lungs from making their bellows-shapes. But the walls started to lay their rough-stitched silence heavily on the body, until the quiet was so close around that the body was sure it would begin bleeding.   
  
So the body began to talk to itself. It would tell itself stories from the book ( _ Listen: she sewed and sewed the nettle shirts for seven years without a word…). _ It told what it had learned about the moon, the oceans, the growing of wheat and falling of rain. It told what it had learned about how to make lights appear in the dark, born and dying like living creatures.    
  
When the body had been a boy (a man; a citizen) the family had had a cat; the body told those stories and made up what the cat would do if it were in the soft room ( _ paw and paw at this loose thread, chase that dust mote like a mouse _ ).   
  
Then the body began to whisper its stories to the walls, starting all over again from the bottom of what the magpie knew. It began to cut from one and graft to another, growing new stories.   
  
And, when the body could not bear to make the mouth shape any more stories, it spoke to the dead people. They were sunk still into the swamp in the belly, and they would be there until the body stopped ( __ I am sorry. I am sorry your son can’t join you. I am sorry this dirty body cannot bring him back to you ).   
  
(Sometimes the body wondered if the ears were really hearing the voice. How could the body be sure, if no other ears could confirm the existence of sound? When the body wondered like this, the throat opened and the mouth began to wail. The shapes the body’s screaming made struck the walls and returned to the body. The screams in the walls and the screams in the body spoke to each other and then the body could begin to believe the ears.)   
  
In the end the body gave up on sound, and let the walls bleed silence all over itself.   
  
The body could not see sun, and so the body wanted to think the time in the room was one long moment, one long pause between breaths. But when the body had been a man (a boy; a soldier) he had always known the passing of time like the pulsing of his own heart, and the body did too.   
  
So the body knew it was seven-hundred thirty days it spent in the soft room, and when the hands pulled the body out it cried and it kissed the hands.   
  
  
***   
  
  
After—the body still hoped it was done being and could stop soon. But it did not try to stop itself again.   
  
After—whatever the hands did, even if it was pain, the body could not help turning into it, like a seedling’s green face following the path of the sun.   
  
  
***   
  
These are the things the body knows:   
  
The body is a sick and ugly thing, full of rot and slither.   
  
The body will stay in the box until the body is clean, or until it stops being.   
  
The body is not allowed to stop being.   
  
The body will never get clean.    
  
  
***   
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> More on the tags/content warnings: Basically Caleb is in an asylum with little to no patient protection, which practices outdated and inhumane treatments for mental illness. Somewhat graphic depictions of said treatments: hydrotherapy, bleeding-as-treatment, and chemically-induced vomiting and paralysis. Straight jackets and being tied to a bed. Solitary confinement is fairly graphically described. Suicide attempts are mentioned but not described. Suicidal ideation and self-loathing. Sexual abuse is obliquely implied (although I don’t think you have to read it that way if you don’t want) but nothing is described. Cotard delusion warning(?): in this mental state, Caleb thinks he’s dead. 
> 
> If I missed anything, please let me know and I’ll tag/warn for it.


End file.
